This is madness. Prior to the election campaign, it seemed certain that the Conservatives were going to scrape a majority and form the next government, even though their leader had emerged as an opportunistic populist, whose greatest pre-recession indignation was that too many people paid too much tax on their unearned inheritance income.

It was not even hard to see why this had happened. It is widely acknowledged that oppositions don't win elections – governments lose them. Labour had presided over a fantasy boom that had created an unsustainable and geographically limited economy. Its catastrophically deluded belief was that it had banished boom and bust. What's more, even during that boom – when I'm sure a British government had more money to spend than ever before – Labour had not even managed to forge a more balanced and socially cohesive society.

In fact, unbelievably, it had done the opposite, and made the relatively poor relatively poorer. As for looking after those most in need, it had not even housed them. Instead, even less council accommodation had been built than under Thatcher, and some of the estates on which the poorest lived had become even more hopeless, state- dependent places than they were under the last Conservative government – starved of social capital, denied local economic activity, and reliant on charitable efforts to support children attempting to escape from monumentally abusive homes.

Even before the recession, Labour had been losing ground to another progressive force, the Liberal Democrats, not least because of their further obscene failures – on civil liberties, foreign policy, criminal justice, parliamentary and electoral reform, pensions, education, mental health provision and social care. Unlike the Conservatives, the Lib Dems had seen fit to warn of the instability of the British credit boom, well before the 2005 general election. Even in that last election, when people were understandably reluctant to accept that the boom would end – and badly – this alternative progressive force polled almost a quarter of the popular vote.

But that only got them a 10th of the seats in parliament, and the political and media establishment continued to discount the Lib Dems, conceding only, as the invasion of Iraq became a disorganised bloodbath, that the party of the "protest voter" might have had a few wise words to say on that matter, and that matter alone. The Lib Dems were taken seriously neither by the two main parties nor by the media, even though, by weird happenstance, the party had netted itself a decent Treasury spokesman.

Then, thanks to the first television debate, a horrible secret was revealed to the public. Nick Clegg was a perfectly respectable party leader, eminently capable of giving the big boys a run for their money. Suddenly, the Conservatives could no longer count on a majority. And what's more – hallelujah! – the electorate, especially the young, were finally pricking up their ears, and deciding it was perhaps worth registering to vote after all. Except that the message from the media was the Lib Dems could not win.

This was understandable, coming from the larger rightwing media, which garnished its "Vote Clegg, get Brown" message with talk of Nazi slurs and private bank accounts. But the progressive and "impartial" mainstream media fluffed its message, too. There was virtually no analysis of how a Lib Dem win might happen, or what it could mean.

Instead, there was merely an obsession with what the Lib Dems might do if they "held the balance of power", and a cynical hope from die-hard Labour supporters in the media that while the Lib Dems might be useful in getting the Tories out of some seats, they shouldn't take Labour seats, and certainly shouldn't "divide the progressive vote" – thus risking letting the Conservatives in (even though the Tories had been getting in anyway, before the Lib Dems had their surge).

For all the talk of "game changing", the obvious fact was also never aired that, just this once, it was pointless to vote for any of the genuinely niche parties. Mass strategic abandonment of the "others", in favour of the Lib Dems, would alone have brought them up a few notches in the polls. This, in turn, would have fostered a perception that a Lib Dem vote was a positive one, and would definitely have made them the first or second party, in seats.

It wouldn't even have mattered which way round this result ended up. If the Lib Dems won outright, proportional representation would be assured, and those "others" would from there on in have votes that actually counted. If the Lib Dems came second, depriving the Conservatives of an absolute majority, then the likely consequence would be a Lib Dem-led coalition with Labour, again with proportional representation the prize for us all – especially "the others", who should have the right to democratic representation, however "dangerous" the mainstream deems them to be.

Now – and it would be hilarious if it was not so sad – Clegg is pilloried even for imagining that he could lead the country. A perfectly reasonable hypothetical observation, in answer to a question put to him again and again – that it would be crazy for Gordon Brown to remain prime minister if he polled fewer votes than either of the other main parties – is parleyed into personal arrogance about who should be choosing what for other political parties and the country. And a clear indication that Clegg would not enter into a coalition with a party that would not deliver PR is somehow interpreted as possible coalition with the one party that remains unshakeably committed to first past the post. What a total mess. What a terrible missed opportunity. What a disgrace.

Can the Lib Dems get their message across in this final week, with vastly smaller resources than the other two parties, and faced with a media that persists in asking "old politics" questions? Well, I guess there's still hope. But not much. Instead, the party that is poised to make the largest, fastest cuts, and has been least honest about the cuts it intends to make, is likely to get in – either with a mandate to make these unspecified cuts, or as the minority government least able to work positively with the other two in order to tackle the deficit. And the party that came closest to telling the truth, and made its own cuts most imaginatively and creatively, will have hardly any more seats than it did a month ago. Doh!